Exploring Covid-19 Vaccinations in the United States by Race and Ethnicity

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to highlight inequality in health outcomes in the United States. As of April 23rd, 2021, the CDC reports that Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Alaska Native people are more likely to test positive for, be hospitalized for, and die from Covid-19 when compared to white, non-Hispanic people. Considering these disparities alongside recent developments in vaccine distribution, we became curious as to how race and ethnicity relate to immunization rates in each state.

Various data sources have presented vaccination progress in terms of each state’s efficiency (use of allocated vaccines) and speed (proportion of population that is vaccinated). We have developed a range of visualizations to consider how race and ethnicity relate to vaccine progress in the United States.

Are states vaccinating demographic groups proportionally to their share of the population?

One of our goals was to make a visualization to see whether demographic groups were receiving their share of Covid-19 vaccines. We present this using a Hexbin map, a 2-D density technique where each state is represented with a hexagon. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) collects data on the percentage of vaccines that have been distributed to six racial and ethnic group. They began publishing this on March 1, 2021 and have recently been re-publishing this weekly. KFF also maintains a dataset of population distribution by race and ethnicity in each state. We developed a “demographic metric” comparing these two values to be able to indicate whether demographic groups were receiving a proportionate share of vaccinations:

Demographic Metric = % of vaccines that went to a given group in a state% of state population that is made up of that group

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Does vaccine hesitancy explain

Considering vaccine distribution at the county level

New York City

Texas

References

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summary(cars)
##      speed           dist       
##  Min.   : 4.0   Min.   :  2.00  
##  1st Qu.:12.0   1st Qu.: 26.00  
##  Median :15.0   Median : 36.00  
##  Mean   :15.4   Mean   : 42.98  
##  3rd Qu.:19.0   3rd Qu.: 56.00  
##  Max.   :25.0   Max.   :120.00

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Speed Distance
Min. : 4.0 Min. : 2.00
1st Qu.:12.0 1st Qu.: 26.00
Median :15.0 Median : 36.00
Mean :15.4 Mean : 42.98
3rd Qu.:19.0 3rd Qu.: 56.00
Max. :25.0 Max. :120.00

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